The Dallas City Council has a pretty easy decision to make Wednesday: picking the new guy to fill one of the city's seven spots on the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board. Sounds so boring, I know. Because, yeah. It should be. No-brainer boring.

It ought to take the council all of two minutes to plow through the agenda item. Except, knowing this council, they'll spend a solid hour bickering over the DART thing, at least one council member will ask what "DART" stands for, it'll come down to the North Dallas council members, and they'll go with the wrong guy.

They already did it once, at a committee meeting a few weeks back, when three council members on the Transportation Committee voted in favor of the guy who's never used public transportation (Howard Gilberg) over the guy who spent years riding the rails and hopping the bus when he went car-free (Patrick Kennedy). No reason to think it couldn't happen again.

You're just the wrong guy for the gig. You said it yourself a couple of weeks back: You don't ride DART, don't really know where it goes and don't know much about what it does except move people from here to there to here to there. You said it yourself when being interviewed by the Transportation Committee: You have "an awful lot to learn," and "I am not an expert."

"I wanted an actual expert," Clayton told me, "and not someone we appointed because they wanted to be on a board."

From left to right: Ed Meyer, Patrick Kennedy and former Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt were pallbearers during a "funeral march" for the Trinity Toll Road project back in June 2014.

((Brad Loper/Staff photographer))

Full disclosure: I've been linking to and citing Patrick Kennedy's writing about transportation in Dallas since long before I could understand his ideas. Started sometime around 2009, when I was running something called Unfair Park and he was writing his blog Living Carfree in Big D -- "Or How I Learned to Stop Driving and Love the Walk," as it was sorta-subtitled. I've also given him money: I bought a T-shirt from him when he was trying to tear down a highway, because I liked the idea and the logo.

Back then there were, like, two guys raising hell about making Dallas more walkable: Kennedy and Jason Roberts, the musician who started better-blocking North Oak Cliff and launched the Oak Cliff Transit Authority, which ultimately led to that downtown-to-Bishop Arts streetcar.

"I had my blog, Bike Friendly Oak Cliff, and he started Carfree, and we would comment on each other's blogs, because who else was nuts enough to want to change the city and make it walkable," Roberts said. "Oddballs stick together. We were the only ones who thought it was a good idea, and it was amazing to see how quickly people took notice. There was this mass of people waiting for someone to stand up and say we absolutely want these things. We tapped into it. We were vocal about it."

Kennedy, who's 38 and moved to Dallas in 2002, got folks' attention in a hurry. In 2009, Rodger Jones wrote on this website that he "cares about growing a smart city, sustainable stuff, mobility." A year later this newspaper profiled Kennedy and noted that "Dallas news outlets often link to the blog, and developers and city officials have contacted him after reading certain posts."

Around the same time the Texas Observer let him go long in a wide-ranging Q&A in which he reminded us that Dallas used to be walkable -- "and a streetcar mecca" -- and said we suffer from Stockholm Syndrome "towards the cars and the policy that shackled us to them."

Almost four years ago, it was Kennedy who first broached the idea of tearing down the overpass known as Interstate 345, which separates downtown from Deep Ellum. At first no one took him seriously. Then the Real Estate Council offered to fund a look-see. Then, long story short, the Texas Department of Transportation was analyzing what an adiosed 345 would look like in its historic CityMap document.

When I talked to Kennedy about this a few weeks back, he wanted to make one thing clear.

"I don't see myself as a crusader for downtown or the core," he said. "It's about best practices throughout the city and investing in the right infrastructure. It's about doing the right thing for the right place and appropriating the right resources for the best outcomes for all."

For all -- what a novel concept. Especially at City Hall, where council members talk about their districts like they're islands and seldom treat the city as a collection of neighborhoods that need each other to survive and thrive.

Kennedy, by the way, is pushing for something the whole city desperately needs -- a complete overhaul of DART's bus routes. Ridership is woefully low -- 23rd out of 29 transit agencies ranked by the mayor's own poverty task force in September. Worse still, said that same report: "Less than 20 percent of jobs are accessible by transit in less than 90 minutes."